Freelance Traveller

The Corporate Repo Career

by Joshua Levy

This was the featured article in the September/October 2017 issue.

Corporate Repo: Individual involved in the corporate repossession of spaceships, legally owned by large corporations, that have been seized by governments or organizations on shaky legal grounds.

This article presents the Corporate Repo career in the same format as other careers in the Cepheus Engine rules. It can easily be converted to other Traveller rules which use a career system.

“The Corporate Repo Campaign” (Freelance Traveller, May/June 2017, p. 32) describes campaigns for these characters. They usually work as a team to recover starships which have been seized by governments or criminal organizations, often through legal manipulations or outright fraud which would never be allowed in more civilized parts of the Imperium.

Repo teams have the skills to operate large starships, but they also have the skills to separate them from their current, illegitimate owners. These skills include “white collar” type criminal skills, legal and political manipulation skills, breaking and entering, and even some straight up violence skills.

In most of the Imperium, a Repo agent bears the same relationship to a rogue that privateers bear to pirates—there’s a lot of commonality in their actions, but the Repo agent operates with the permission and backing of a larger entity with legal status.

I generally start by thinking about what kind of repo agent this character will be. What skills will he/she bring to the team trying to liberate a ship? This step is not part of the chargen mechanics, but it is part of imagining the character you want. I think of six basic areas:

• Fraud, Cons, and Flim Flams
• Breaking and Entering (Includes physical and electronic techniques, and hacking.)
• Disguise and Impersonation
• Violence (Simple thuggery, armed criminals, demolitions, and ex-military types.)
• Forgery and Fakes (Research to select original and skills to make fakes, including paperwork, computer records, or physical objects.)
• General (Team leaders, lawyers, political animals, rabble rousers, stakeout specialists, and people who work with the local crooks.)

The Cepheus Engine character creation tables follow. Some tables include Rogue career data for comparison.
 

Engineering is the basic skill for rank-0 corporate repo characters, because they are often moving large ships, which require a lot of engineers. Therefore, the entire team should be able to pitch in and help in Engineering.

Streetwise is the basic skill for rank-2 characters, because it helps with a wide range of vessel recovery techniques.

The referee should, as usual, feel free to modify the tables to fit the campaign—for example, rank-4 characters might get an automatic skill of Admin-1 or Advocate-1.
 

Note on High Passage or Starship benefit: If you run a “ship poor” universe, then this should be a high passage, but if you run a universe where many characters have spaceships, then this is the way to get a Corporate Repo character a ship. Another option is to have the ship owned jointly by the character’s old repo team. This is similar to owning shares in a ship, but a little more personal and hands-on.

Usually, a starship benefit means that the character knows about a “misplaced” spaceship. Perhaps, it was a ship used as cover, and which had to be abandoned; maybe it was cargo on a larger ship repossessed 20 years ago; or an auxiliary ship on a repossessed ship, etc.

In this case, the referee should decide if the character owns title “free and clear” or if they merely have physical possession of it. If the character officially owns the ship, he or she can sell it for cash. Otherwise, the character can use the ship (or let others use it), but not sell it outright, at least not legally in the Imperium. If the character does not have “free and clear” ownership, then any interaction with the authorities could lead to the ship being impounded.

Alternatively, the corporation for which the repo has worked may give the repo an old ship either as a severance benefit, or as prepayment for calling the repo back into service as needed. This is similar to the ship benefit that retired scouts sometimes get. These ships could be anything, but are usually small.
 

Adding Depth to a Repo Character

If the referee approves it, characters may roll on the following tables, adding that piece of history to their character. The referee should decide how often each character rolls. For quick characters, maybe just once during their first term (this kind of stuff tends to happen when a character is young), or once or twice per term, to add more depth to their character’s development.
 

As an alternate rule, the referee may allow players to select results, or the referee and player can work together to select results, rather than roll randomly. This can lead to a more interesting and coherent lifepath, and can apply to just the tables in this section or to the entire chargen process.

Ships Recovered

The following section can be used to fill in a corporate repo character’s “resume”, if desired. For lower ranked repos, this resume is basically a list of ships and the situation from which they were liberated. For higher ranking repos, this resume also includes various managerial tasks.

While ranks 0-2 a corporate repo will recover 2d6 / 2 (rounded up) ships per term. If rank 3 or 4, they will oversee or supervise that many repo operations, and also deal with 1d6 external managerial emergencies. And if they are rank 5 or 6, the will supervise that many repo operations, deal with 1d6 external issues, and 1d6 internal issues.

If details matter, for each ship recovered, roll once for each column on the following table to fill in the details of the repo operation.
 

If details about the character’s career as a corporate repo manager/executive matter, then roll on the following table, once per issue.